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All fired up

I always wanted to be Judy Garland," laughs the ceramist Abigail Simpson in her east London studio, as she tells tales of her childhood. It's all stories of dressing up and showing off - not quite what you'd expect from a down-to-earth, hands-on potter. But then ceramics came late to Simpson, who started out as an aspiring actress.

She has more than an air of Audrey Hepburn about her, with chic, gamine looks that belie her age (she's 43), and it's easy to believe that she "once spent weeks in a Parisian cafe, smoking Gitanes and waiting to be discovered". It didn't happen - "Well, I didn't speak a word of French, for a start" - and her acting career petered out almost as soon as she got to drama school. "The people weren't at all how I'd imagined them," she explains. "They weren't extravagant, they were introverted. It was such a disappointment."